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Monday, September 04, 2006

Resolving Credit Card Disputes

Image this if you will, one day you receive your statement in your mailbox and of course you do not assume anything out of the ordinary because you only used the card one time last month, which was to buy your niece a birthday present. No big deal you think, this can be paid off in full, and so you take the statement and sit down with your checkbook ready to send it off. You open your statement and you find it full of purchases three to sears and many to places you have never even been to and know you did not make. What do you do now?

Are you aware of your rights that you possess when a fraudulent purchase is made upon your credit card?

Here we are going to talk about fraudulent charges, first of all, this means charges that you, yourself did not make. The federal law has implemented certain rights that will help you if there is ever an instance of charges upon your card that were not made by you. This law, called the Fair Credit Billing Act, limits the responsibility placed on you for charges you were not aware of to only $50. If you find, when opening your statement, that there are unauthorized charges on it, there is a specific procedure you must follow in order to resolve the issue right away.

The first thing that you should do is call the company and explain to them that those charges are not yours and were not made by you. The company will then give you a specific set of instructions you should follow. Additionally, take some time out to look over your other statements, ensure that there were no other unauthorized charges made that you might have missed.

Typically, the reporting credit card business will most probably ask you to sign a statement confirming these charges were unauthorized. It is important that you refrain from using this card while the charge dispute is in process.

After the charges are resolved and removed from your statement you should obtain a copy of your credit report, obtain one from each major bureau to ensure that the particular credit card record has been updated with them. The reason for this is because it is likely that during the dispute these charges could have formed late payments that might have been reported to the credit bureaus.